Lacan and the Posthuman

Zu diesem Buch

When Posthumanism displaces the traditional human subject, what does psychoanalysis add to contemporary conversations about subject/object relations, systems, perspectives, and values? This book discusses whether Posthumanism itself is a cultural indication of a shift in thinking that is moving from language to matter, from a politics focused on social relations to one organized according to a broader sense of object in environments. Together the authors question what is at stake in this shift and what psychoanalysis can say about it.

Promoting psychoanalysis’ focus on the cybernetic relationships among subjects, language, social organizations, desire, drive, and other human motivations, this book demonstrates the continued relevance of Lacan’s work not only to continued understandings of the human subject, but to the broader cultural impasses we now face. Why Posthumanism? Why now? In what ways is Posthumanist thought linked to the emergence of digital technologies? Exploring Posthumanism from the insights of Lacan’s psychoanalysis, chapters expose and elucidate not only the conditions within which Posthumanist thought arises, but also reveal symptoms of its flaws: the blindness to anthropomorphization, projection, and unrecognized shifts in scale and perspective, as well as its mode of transcendental thought that enables many Posthumanist declarations. This book explains how Lacanian notions of the subject inform current discussions about human complicity with, and resistance to, algorithmic governing regimes, which themselves more wholly produce a “post”- humanism than any philosophical displacement of human centrality could.

Inhalt

• Louis Armand: The Obscene Object of Post/Humanism
• Judith Roof: From Law to Code: Posthumanism as Sinthome
• Alla Pero: “A Corporal Radioscopy”: Lacan, the Baroque, and the Posthuman
• Colin Wright: Lacan’s Cybernetic Theory of Causality: Repetition and the Unconscious in Duncan Jones’ Source Code
• Ben Woodard: A Fly in the Appointment: Posthuman-Insectoid-Cyberfeminist-Materiality
• Svitlana Matviyenko: Graphocentrism in Psychoanalysis
• John Johnston: Lacan’s Drive and Genetic Posthumans: The Example of Margaret Atwood’s Oryx and Crake
• Nancy Gillespie: Posthuman Desire: The One-All-Alone in Her, Ex Machina, and Lars and the Real Girl
• Scott Wilson: Merzbow and the Noise of Object-Oriented Perversion
• Timothy Morton: Melancholy Objects: If Stones Were Lacanian.

Die Herausgeberinnen

Svitlana Matviyenko is an Assistant Professor of Critical Media Analysis in the School of Communication of Simon Fraser University, Canada. She researches psychology of users’ interaction with the web to theorize the networking drive, user complicity and practices of resistance.

Judith Roof is William Shakespeare Chair in English at Rice University, USA and an attorney-at-law. She is author of monographs and essays to date on topics ranging from psychoanalysis and popular culture, to cinema, modern drama, legal studies, feminist theory, sexuality, narrative theory and comedy.